Chapter 15: In Which We Explore Severus and Lily

Snape went from asleep to awake in less than a second. He had sprung up, reaching for his wand before his eyes were all the way open. A horrifying chill passed through him when he felt the wood of his bedside table and nothing else. His wand wasn't where it belonged. He turned to see his attacker, hoping whoever it was would kill him quickly, and saw Hermione standing in his doorway instead.

His heart began to calm down when he realized he was not in immediate danger of being killed. He took a deep breath, and heard her speak.

"Are you awake?"

"Quite." With the amount of adrenaline pumping through his system, he wasn't sure if he'd ever sleep again. Severus grabbed his blanket and wrapped it around himself. She tossed his wand back to him when his hands were free. He caught it deftly.

"Lily Potter. Your dear friend was Lily Potter." She almost spit the words at him.

He slumped back against the head of his bed when he heard her words.

"I think, Severus, there is more to your story than you let on earlier. You can tell me or not as you see fit. I can and will accept that you've got a past, and the baggage that goes with it, but I won't deal with games or lies. I had enough of that shit from Dumbledore."

He looked at her and heard another voice in the back of his head. "I told you that you needed to tell her."

He said to Hermione, "You may as well sit down." Snape gestured to the end of his bed. "It's a somewhat long story, so you may as well be comfortable. Trust is not something that comes easily to me, but if we are to marry I will need to trust you, so this will be the first exercise in trust. Potter is never, ever, no matter what, to know this. If it is a matter of you telling him what I am about to say to you tonight, or me dying, let me die. That is how intensely I do not want him to know this."

She nodded. The missing element was back. The darkness she remembered from her Hogwarts days was coalescing around him once more. This was the piece to the puzzle she had been looking for.

"Lily was the love of my life. I do not mean to sound like a romantic melodrama; I mean this as a literal truth. We met as children. I loved her from my first sight of her. She was the little redheaded girl who played in the park near my home. Eventually I learned she was a witch. She would jump off the swings at the park and slowly hover down to the ground. After two months of me watching her from afar, her sister saw me, and at that point it was talk or run. I didn't run. I told her she was a witch, and I was a wizard. We became friends.

"Our friendship grew in the three years before our letters came. By the time we set foot on the Hogwarts Express, we had our great magical futures planned out. Our first step: glory for Slytherin. That dream was destroyed by the Sorting Hat. I have never since hated the word Gryffindor as much as I did when that hat called it from her head.

"We saw less and less of each other. Malfoy noticed my brains, and I became the youngest member of his group. Lily was very popular; she always had a crowd of Gryffindor girls about her. We still spent our free time together. During those years Potter, Black, and Lupin decided that I needed to be attacked and insulted at every opportunity. Even with a three or four to one advantage, they rarely got the best of me.

"Like when you were in school, Slytherins and Gryffindors had potions together. We made sure to pair with each other every chance we got. Eventually Potions would be the majority of our time together.

"By fifth year my puppy crush had developed into love. Unfortunately I was not the only one who noticed how beautiful she was. Potter had as well. He decided that the best way to make her notice him was to be the biggest ponce in the history of the world. One day he, Black, Lupin, and Pettigrew caught me unaware and had me unwanded before I could fight back. Lily came to my rescue, and in my embarrassment and anger I insulted her as well as them. I... said something horrible to her. She ran off, and I was afraid I had lost her.

"I spoke to her later that night, and she told me she wanted nothing to do with me: my friends were repulsive to her, and I had become repulsive as well. She left me, and I was devastated. I tried to think of a way to win her back, but nothing, not kindness, not poems, not little presents, worked. Finally luck looked my way.

"You know that Black tried to get me killed by Lupin. In the aftermath of that attack, Dumbledore spent a few minutes looking at me very carefully. Especially watching my eyes. I know now that he had been using Legilimency on me, to see if I was the right man for the job. He must have seen my desperation to win Lily back. Then he offered to buy my silence. If I would keep quiet about Lupin, he would give me a very important role in the coming war. I would be offered a place among the Death Eaters; he could see that Malfoy's crowd was grooming me for that. I would take that role and become his spy among that group. He would teach me Occlumency and Legilimency. I could tell Lily about it, but no one else.

"I agreed. Something so brave, so un-Pure Blood Supremacy was bound to win her heart. And for a while it did. When I told her, she was so proud. She was also interested in learning Occlumency and Legilimency. I actually had the cheek to bring her to my lessons with Dumbledore, and he was willing to teach us both. I think he knew that I would pick it up much faster, and better, if I had someone to practice with.

"By the end of sixth year I was the greatest Occulmense no one had ever heard of. There was only one test left, and that could not be arranged until I was in the presence of Voldemort. Lily and I had developed an odd talent through our studies. Legilimency is not telepathy, but our long friendship and learning together somehow created that kind of a link. We were fully telepathic with each other. Our potions studies increased as well. We worked mostly in my book. Writing our findings and notes, better ways to make potions, new spells we had created.

"In seventh year the Death Eaters and Malfoy began watching me more carefully, and my role as spy began. I had to appear to be amenable to Voldemort's plans, or they would not tap me for membership. I spent less and less time with Lily. Eventually we only saw each other in Potions class, although we could talk anytime due to our mind link. It was during that time she began to notice James. Handsome, funny, rich James. He had been trying to win her for years, and he rightly assessed the only thing standing between him and her was me. So our war continued, but out of her sight, because we both knew she didn't like to see it.

"Towards the end of seventh year they had gone out a few times, and we were still 'best friends.' A month after end of class, I became a Death Eater. The day after my initiation, I went to see her one last time. She had just begun her work as an Unspeakable. There are very few female Unspeakbles, so her first assignment was on the study of Woman's Magic. She had learned of a spell while doing that called the Hero's Farewell. She cast it on me that day, and I still carry her protection.

"We left each other that day sure the Victory Party was only months away. But of course it didn't work that way. And while I was off feeding information to the Order, being a picture perfect Death Eater, she was falling in love with James.

"She married him a year later.

"From that point on, everything went wrong. Dumbledore had me feed Voldemort part of a Prophecy. A year later I found out that she was the target of the Prophecy. There has been only one time I slipped out of my role. I could have died for it, but I didn't care. I begged Dumbledore to protect her, and Voldemort for mercy. Do you understand what I am saying? I knelt in front of the Dark Lord and begged him not to kill her. If there is any testament to the power of the protection she cast on me, it's the fact that he didn't kill me right then and there.

"He didn't kill me. Though in a matter of weeks, I was wishing that he had. I had failed her. The only person who was making my life worth living was dead, and I all but killed her myself. Dumbledore convinced me that my new role was to protect the son she had died to save. I swore to protect him. I never had a life debt to James; that was a convenient fiction. I did have such a debt to Lily.

"Did I hate Harry? No. Did I hate the fact that almost every day for six years I had to look into the face of James Potter and see Lily's eyes? Yes. I had to sit there and see the physical proof that she had loved him. She had chosen him. She had lived with him, slept with him, and had a child with him. That even though he had stayed home and played Quiddich, risking nothing, she chose him. I had to watch the proof that I had failed her every single day for ten months of the year.

"But, as Albus kept reminding me, this was Lily's beloved son, and I had sworn on her death to protect him. You can imagine my total, overwhelming sense of defeat when I finally learned that all we were doing was keeping him alive long enough to walk into his own death. Albus knew the whole time what the end of battle would be, and he kept it from me because he knew I would have walked away had he told me the truth.

"You saw me right before Nagini bit me. By that point I was ready to die. Harry was doomed. Lily was dead. I had failed everything that mattered to me. I could not win her, I could not save her, I could not avenge her, and I could not protect her son.

"I left the memories with Harry, and then I... I'm not sure; I thought I died. I was with Lily, and we were in a grove of trees near the river where we had grown up. I begged her forgiveness. She told me there was nothing to forgive. That all of it had happened the way it had needed to be. Time passed, and I began to feel the weight of all those years of misery lift.

"I woke a week later, still in the Shrieking Shack. Somehow it escaped the destruction of Hogsmeade. I turned myself in, and the rest you're familiar with. Ever since then, she's been there when I talk to myself. I don't think anyone else can see her. I think the reason you saw her was that you were looking at my memory of the event, and since I saw her, you did."

He heard Lily's voice in his mind. "You see, that wasn't so hard."

He was sitting at the head of his bed, blanket wrapped around his body, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them. Hermione was sitting at the foot of the bed, tears in her eyes. His eyes focused on her for the first time since his story began, and he asked, "Why were you so upset when you recognized Lily?"

"Once I knew who she was, I knew everything else you had told me was a lie."

"Everything I told you was true."

"Everything you told me was factually correct. But it was not true. The blackness, the Greasy Git, the animosity, all of that came from believing you failed Lily, and the mourning for her." She sat quietly thinking. "It's why you hated Neville, too. If Voldemort had chosen him instead of Harry..."

Severus shrugged. "The fact that he was a bloody nitwit didn't help, but yes, the core of it was he also sat there a constant reminder of Lily dead, and my part in it."

They sat quietly for a while, and he noticed that he was feeling more relaxed with her than he had with any other human in a very long time. He looked at the clock, "Shall I offer you an early breakfast?"

She glanced over as well, 5:30 in the morning. Her first class started in two and a half hours. "Yes, I'd like to see the rest of your house."

He smiled at her. "I had been looking forward to the first time you had breakfast here, but this isn't quite how I envisioned it."

"Well, this wasn't quite how I envisioned seeing you naked for the first time either." She smiled back